BOOK LAUNCH EVENT — Co-sponsored with the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail and Forest Hills Cemetery
Sunday, November 12th, 2023 at 1-3:30PM
Join us for an event to launch the new book by Susan Wilson: Women and Children First: The Trailblazing Life of Susan Dimock, M.D. The book talk will include an interview with Susan by Jackie Jenkins-Scott, President of Roxbury Community College and former President of the Dimock Community Health Center.
In Boston in 19th-century America, it was assumed that woman patients would be treated by male doctors. The idea of a “woman doctor” was deemed by many to lie somewhere between unfathomable and repugnant.
Then along came Susan Dimock, a young North Carolinian who dreamed of becoming a physician and who grew up to practice medicine in Boston. Dimock was not the first American woman to battle the patriarchal medical establishment. But in the 1870s, she was arguably the best-educated, most skilled woman surgeon in the nation as well as living proof that a woman could be competent, smart, lovely, and kind — all in the same package.
Admission:
This event is free and open to the public.
Location —
Forsyth Chapel, Forest Hills Cemetery
A reception and book-signing after the program will be followed by a visit to Susan Dimock’s gravesite. Refreshments will be served. Books will be available for sale.
About the Author
Susan Wilson is the official House Historian of the Omni Parker House in Boston, an Affiliate Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center of Brandeis University, and an Honorary Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
